How YouTube’s Obsession with Coupling Elsa and Spider-Man Descended Into Madness

Where to Stream:

Frozen (2013)

As anyone who has spent more than five minutes on YouTube knows, the internet is an odd place. However, even after you’ve learned to expect nothing but the worst from it, our digital world can still surprise you. Welcome to the world of Elsa and Spider-Man’s YouTube life.

Watching these videos is unsettling in a way that’s difficult to express. Most of them watch like the opening scenes in a porno, but there are rarely any sexual scenes — an element that oddly makes these videos feel even dirtier. The only reason you really know Elsa and Spider-Man are likely a couple is because Elsa is pregnant in so many of them. All of them are silent, insanely silly, and have views in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. At the time of publication, Webs & Tiaras had over 6.1 million subscribers and 5.6 billion views. The concept of mashing together two characters from completely different franchises is weird for sure, but it’s nothing too absurd for the realm of fan fiction. However, it’s the specificity of these videos paired with the weird backlash this trend has seen that makes the Elsa and Spider-Man videos the perfect encapsulation of weird internet.

The Elsa and Spider-Man trend seemed to start in 2014 with the video “Frozen Elsa Dates Spiderman!” which was uploaded onto DisneyCarToys. The action figure video currently has over 36 million views, but it’s a SEO grab that kind of makes sense. After all, Elsa is arguably the most popular character “for girls” and Spider-Man is arguably the most popular character “for boys.” Creating content that combines these two well-trafficked characters is bound to bring in clicks. The original iterations of this trend definitely seemed aimed at children. Toy Monster, the master account behind Webs & Tiaras, was the first channel to really capitalize on this trend starting in December of 2015, and it’s been bringing in bonkers numbers ever since.

The channel’s numbers were so good, in fact, they sparked a bit of a controversy. Ethan and Hila Klein, two popular YouTubers and the creative force behind h3h3productions posted a video in May of 2016 dissecting Webs & Tiaras’ numbers. The duo pointed to these videos’ gibberish comments section as proof that the Elsa and Spider-Man-loving channel wasn’t seeing real traffic but was actually dependent on bots. The accusation sparked a good amount of debate among certain communities. This claim was quickly debunked by one of Webs & Tiaras co-founders. In an interview with Tubefilter’s Geoff Weiss, Eric, who did not give his last name, refuted Ethan and Hila’s claims, stating that most of Webs & Tiaras traffic comes from related video suggestions. As for the weird comments, Webs & Tiaras has a lot of children in its audience who cannot type well. “If we were not respecting the rules, YouTube would certainly have taken notice,” Eric said in the interview.

It would be nice if the story of Elsa and Peter Parker’s quirky online romance could end there, but because the internet is a garbage place where no one can have nice things, it can’t. The insane popularity of this niche trend has sparked counter-content. Recently YouTubers like Moe and E.T., Dennis Cee, and Coby Persin have started to jump on this trend, creating their own Elsa and Spider-Man videos that are decidedly more mature. Featuring near nudity, faked violence, sexual situations, and more feces than you would want, these videos from “prank” channels are formatted to look just like a sloppier version of the kid-friendly Webs & Tiaras. To give you an idea of what these copycat creators are like, Moe and E.T. are best known for their “Pranks in the Hood” series where they picks fights with with people outside of a housing project in New York City. Saying that these creators’ sense of humor is controversial is a generous understatement. However, children shouldn’t be able to access these mature knock-off YouTube videos as long as YouTube’s kid filter is on. I’m not going to link to any of these grosser counter videos, so enjoy watching Disney princesses and superheroes discover fidget spinners:

It’s a weird section of the internet that only seems to get weirder with time. However, in some way, it’s a story that encompasses everything that makes the web such a beautiful and toxic place: A fan fiction pairing that makes no sense gains an absurd amount of popularity with an audience you wouldn’t expect. A group of people capitalize on that popularity. Another group attacks the first group once they learn of their success. A third group creates a series of ill-advised and gross videos as a “joke” to the original trend. No one stops any of these things, creators make money, and another odd section of the web continues to thrive.

Remember this and pregnant Elsa when you’re making plans to watch Tom Holland’s Spider-Man.